I remember vividly the first time I heard a song by Francis Poulenc. I was living in Los Angeles after having spent the previous year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, during which time I had taken voice lessons-almost my first-with Pierre Bernac. I had never heard Bernac sing, however, and at that time, not being curious about new music I had never heard any songs by Poulenc. Bernac undoubtedly thought I wasn't ready for them and hadn't shown me any.

One day while browsing in a record store, I came upon “Soirée française,” a Bernac-Poulenc album. I took it home and put on the side that was all Poulenc. First came four songs of Apollinaire, which I found very charming and pleasant. But then came Paul Eluard's “Tu vois le feu du soir.” I was absolutely stunned by its beauty. I played it over and over, and from that moment on I was an ardent fan of Poulenc and Bernac. As it turns out, that song is a good introduction to Poulenc. He himself wrote that he would choose “Tu vois” from among his songs if he were playing the "what to take to a desert island" game.

Francis Poulenc no longer needs an introduction to music lovers. It has become customary to accord him a position of primacy among "Le Groupe des Six." While 30 years ago many critics and musicians were willing to dismiss his music as trivial or unadventurous, the opinion is now widely accepted that Poulenc was a minor master who found his personal musical voice early and remained true to it. Above all, he was a supremely gifted setter of words, and his vocal music - three operas, two cantatas, numerous other religious choral works, and 152 solo songs - constitutes the major part of his output.

That he was such a prolific song composer is due in large measure to Bernac's influence on him and their long performing collaboration. In 1935, these two remarkable artists decided to form a duo to bring to the song recital the same extensive rehearsal periods and the same scrupulous attention to detail that a string quartet takes for granted. They performed together for 25 years and in the course of that period they premiered more than 90 Poulenc songs.

Poulenc and Bernac had identical views on the responsibility of a composer to his text and of a performer to both poetry and music. Poulenc wrote, "It is not only the lines of the poem that must be set to music, but all that lies between the lines and in the margins." Bernac's elegant and expressive enunciation helped Poulenc immeasurably in realizing his aim. Bernac wrote that in Poulenc's music "there is no disunity between the two conceptions which the interpreter has to express: that of the poet and that of the musician."

It is not surprising, given his ardent love for poetry, that Poulenc was drawn to a singer rather than to an instrumentalist as a collaborator, but it is fortunate that he chose Bernac, with his fastidious taste and high standards. He often consulted Bernac on questions of dynamics, tempo, range, etc. Out of their partnership came what I think is the best body of songs written in the 20th century.

What makes Poulenc's songs so special to me? Many things-but at the top of the list would be the breadth of his poetic interest and his marvelous ability to find a style appropriate to any mood: outrageous humor, profound love, adoration of nature, religious piety, or subtle combinations of emotions.

As a performer I revel in the quick switches of character from, say, lover to mocker. I enjoy juxtaposing a genuinely moving love song such as “C'est ainsi que tu es” - in which the lover describes his beloved so that she will believe he truly knows her - with, perhaps, “Madrigal” - in which the poet comments that a woman without a bosom is like a partridge without orange sauce.

I can never remain unmoved singing "C”, Louis Aragon's description of the refugees' flight south from Paris during World War II. Aragon finds heart-breaking images of destruction and loss and couches them in a poetic tour-de-force, ending each line with the syllable "cé." Poulenc matches the text with music of exceptional beauty, capturing both the nostalgia for happier days and the pain of exile. For Poulenc, who said he was never at home outside Paris, this poem must have carried special meaning.

And, finally, I am always struck by Poulenc's ability to illuminate difficult poetry. I may find certain phrases and images hard to understand, but I am never unsure of how Poulenc felt about those words. His music is always emotionally clear.

Many people have criticized Poulenc's songs for being too similar in style, as though he had nine or so formulae and all the poems were fitted into one or another. There are strong similarities among many of the songs (just as there are with Bach arias), but I find their differences more striking. My favorite Poulenc type is the slow song with the pulsing eighth notes in the accompaniment and the lush harmonies with all their ninths. But if we compare three such songs, for example, “C”, “Tu vois le feu du soir” and “Montparnasse,” we find that Poulenc has managed, within the same basic musical vocabulary, to convey the anguish of “C”, the exaltation of “Tu vois,” and the subtle humor, the wide-eyed wonder and the love of Paris of “Montparnasse.” He does it with little touches: in “Montparnasse” an arpeggio in the piano makes gentle fun of the "lyric poet from Germany"; pamphlets in which virtue has never been so well defended are described almost in parlando ("speaking")-an event rare enough in Poulenc's music to highlight the moment; the poet's eyes are likened to balloons flying off in search of adventure, and the voice descends in three humorous glissandos as it underscores "aventure." In “Tu vois,” the exalted moments are reached by large crescendos, also infrequent in Poulenc; the subtle modulations keep us constantly refreshed, as the poet is, by the aspects of nature that he sees.

No matter what topic Poulenc treats, his songs retain certain characteristics. They are, above all, lyrical and must be well sung; parlando appears very rarely, Sprechstimme never. Even the funniest songs are sung, not caricatured: “Avant le cinéma” requires real vocalism as well as a command of patter-delivery worthy of Major General Stanley. A beautiful and supple legato line is an absolute necessity when singing Poulenc. Yet the songs are not sentimental. Even in the lushest, most sensuous songs, Poulenc rarely allows rubato. In fact, he is very often at pains to countermand it. “Surtout sans ralentir”("Above all without slowing down") appears at the end of a vast number of songs. Poulenc loves sharp dynamic contrasts; sudden alterations in volume are much more common than crescendos and diminuendos. He sometimes likes to vary the dynamics in the piano and voice parts separately so that their independence is clear and one part or another is thrown into sharper relief.

Poulenc was an unusual pianist. He apparently had an excellent if not prodigious technique, and he was a virtuoso with the pedals. His song accompaniments reflect these capabilities. They can be very hard to play and they require enormous sensitivity of touch and pedal. What Poulenc loved in his teacher, Ricardo Viñes-that "he could play clearly in a flood of pedal"-is what he demands constantly in his songs: "In a halo of pedals," "Bathed in pedal," "One must pedal constantly."

Those who watched him play say that even where he wrote “sec” ("dry") he would pedal. I remember once working on the cycle “Tel jour, telle nuit” with Bernac. With me was a German-trained American pianist who was playing the songs as if they were Bach toccatas. Bernac kept asking for more pedal and finally insisted that she put her foot down for four measures and hold it there. She was appalled-of course, the pedaling should be more subtle than that-but it was fascinating to hear that the music sounded infinitely better overpedaled than dry..

How did Poulenc convey the meaning of poems? How did he get between the lines and into the margins? Mainly by carefully shaping the melodic line to fit the mood he wanted and by shifting the harmonies artfully under it. The shape of the line seems to be more important than precisely matched prosody. Comparing Fauré, Debussy, and Poulenc may help illustrate this.

Fauré sets a poem as a whole, creates a complete surrounding for it, and pays minimal attention to the setting of individual syllables and words. Weak syllables may come on strong beats or on high notes; the musical idea takes precedence. In his great song, “Clair de lune,” for example, he sets his minuet going in the piano; musically he portrays the moonlight and the garden where the action is taking place, and he lets the poem unfold in a rather straightforward way without any particular word-painting or lingering over specific syllables. This is very reminiscent of Schubert: when a Schubert piano part begins, we may find ourselves on horseback, for instance, or listening to a brook or transported by certain introductory chords into a mood of religious meditation; and the poem is then delivered simply, within that setting.

Debussy, like Hugo Wolf, takes great pains in rendering each syllable perfectly so that the words determine the shape of the musical line: short syllables get short notes, and where a protraction is necessary to a proper reading of the poem there will be long notes or rests in the music-quite the opposite of Fauré and Schubert.

Poulenc lies somewhere in between, perhaps closer to Schumann. Often long sections will be set with only quarter notes and eighth notes, including mute e's set evenly into the line. Poulenc's declamation will not be clumsy, nor will it obscure the text, but often one feels as if the line is governed more by the meaning behind the words than by the words themselves-more by the tone of voice needed to read them properly than by their speech rhythms.

Another interesting similarity between Poulenc and Schumann is in the composition of their song cycles. Poulenc wrote several collections of songs like Schumann's “Myrthen,” which were composed together but can be excerpted at will: “Banalités,” “Fiançailles pour rire,” “Chansons gaillardes,” etc. But he also wrote cycles like Schumann's “Liederkreis,” Op. 39, which should be performed in their entirety, and which are held together by their mood, not by a story line: “Tel jour telle nuit,” “Caligrammes,” “Le Travail du peintre” and “La Fraicheur et le Feu” are examples.

Poulenc talks about cycles in his marvelous Journal de mes mélodies (Paris, Editions Bernard Grasset, 1964), a journal he kept specifically with reference to his songs. In it he tells something about every song he wrote, about his feeling for them, how and why they were composed, with random reflections on how they ought to be performed. Reading the Journal in reference to “Tel jour telle nuit” is fascinating. The section begins with a tribute: "It will never be sufficiently realized how much I owe to Eluard [the poet of the cycle's texts], how much I owe to Bernac. It is due to them that lyricism entered into my vocal work."

Here are some of his specific comments: "I think that a song in a cycle should have a special color and architecture. A mixed group of Fauré songs (even of the same period) will never have the unity of “La Bonne Chanson,” for example. That is why I opened and closed “Tel jour, telle nuit” with two songs of similar tempo and sound... “À toutes brides” has no other pretension than to set off “Une herbe pauvre.” [What Poulenc composed was an extremely fast, noisy song of little musical importance preceding a jewel of the utmost simplicity, quiet and calm.] The last measures [of the final song] reach back to “Bonne journée” [the first]. It is very difficult to get interpreters to understand that in a love poem only calm gives intensity. Anything else is a nurse's kiss."

How should American singers work on Poulenc songs? We can take our best cue from Poulenc himself. He wrote: When I have chosen a poem of which the musical setting at times may not come to my mind until months later, I examine it in all its aspects. When it is a question of Apollinaire or Eluard, I attach the greatest importance to the way in which the poem is placed on the page, to the spaces, to the margins. I recite the poem to myself many times. I listen. I search for the traps. At times I underline the text in red at the difficult spots. I note the breathing places. I try to discover the inner rhythms of a line which is not necessarily the first. Next I try to set it to music bearing in mind the different densities of the piano accompaniment. When I am held up over a detail of prosody I do not persist. Sometimes I wait for days. I try to forget the word until I see it as a new word. I rarely begin a song at the beginning. One or two lines, chosen at random, take hold of me, and very often give the tone, the hidden rhythm, the key to the work.

Since Poulenc puts such emphasis on the proper rendering of the poem, a singer can do no less. Ideally we should all be fluent in whatever languages we choose to sing, but this rarely happens. Even those of us who are fluent in French often need help when dealing with Poulenc's favorite poets: Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, Louise de Vilmorin, Max Jacob. Fortunately Bernac also wrote a book on all the Poulenc songs, Francis Poulenc: The Man and His Songs (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1977), from which the quotation above is drawn, page 39. It contains a discussion of every song and includes the proper pronunciation of the words, literal translations by Winifred Radford, suggestions for performance and often his own insights into the poetry.

Working on a poem, for me, means reading it silently-preferably as it appears on the printed page, not the musical score-until I think I understand it. As an encouragement to singers who are perplexed by Eluard or Apollinaire, I remember many times asking Bernac what a line meant a receiving in answer only an eloquent shrug. I do often find it useful, especially with Eluard, to figure out what he is looking at or describing, since a great deal of French poetry seems to grow out of visual imagery.

Once I have some idea of the meaning of the poem, I practice declaiming it until I am comfortable with it: often I try to find several different readings for it. Then I declaim it in Poulenc's reading: his tempo and meter, his dynamics, his inflections. I usually discover that these restrictions bring appropriate colors and tones of voice to my reading. Then I sing it. If there are vocal difficulties, I try to isolate them from the words. I want to be sure that I can sing the notes easily, the legatos wherever required, the dynamics called for, if necessary without the words at first. When I am technically at ease, I work on the piece complete.

The fact that the songs were written for Bernac creates problems for some of the rest of us. Bernac was a baryton-martin, a particular French category of voice-Debussy's Pelléas, for example-a light baritone that reaches easily up to A-flat or A, and down to low A-flat, with a full volume range at both ends of the voice. Poulenc often asks for forte at the bottom of the range and pianissimo at the top. Since the proper dynamics are crucial to the songs, I recommend that singers who can't manage the effects called for in any particular song should choose another one...or another composer.

In addition to their books, Poulenc and Bernac left us a legacy in many ways as valuable to would-be Poulenc singers: their recordings. It is useful for us to hear what they did, as well as what they said. In print they both abhor rubato, but on records we can hear that they used it; it is discreet and tasteful, but it is there. Their early recording of “C” is a particularly good example.

Bernac also left us a teaching legacy. Indeed much of our knowledge and appreciation of the Poulenc songs is due to Bernac's extensive second career as a teacher. He trained a generation of singers to share his values when singing French repertoire: scrupulous attention to the poem, elegance of enunciation, rigorous adherence to the composer's intentions, and insistence that the hallmark of French style is a perfect legato and full vocalism. And though he speaks throughout his book about being careful, and not going too far, when dealing with some of the very Parisian, almost vulgar, Poulenc songs, I remember him in lessons constantly demanding from his American students (perhaps because of our Puritan heritage) "plus de mauvais goût" ("more bad taste"). He loved a full-voiced approach and such a Romantic device as portamento.

In fact, for those who, like Anna Russell, believe that the French song is "great poetry set to rather wispy music" ("Je n'ai pas la plume de ma tante" is her example of the genre), an exposure to the intensity of a Bernac-Poulenc performance of Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc would be quite a surprise. As I mentioned, my first encounter with their music-making gave me quite a shock. Fortunately, its effects have never worn off.

Poulenc once wrote, "Don't analyze my music, love it." I love it.